Question: What do you think of men who cook?

I like men who can cook. I'd even say I have a definite preference for men who can cook. Cooking itself doesn't matter to me so much, since I'm not really into eating* (yes, yes, I know I'm weird), but I like what it says about the man:

- It says he's not caught up in old-fashioned gender roles
- It says he takes pride in creating something and in being self-sufficient
- It says he has the patience to learn a skill and refine it over time
- It says he's interested in the details

These are all good things, IMO. It doesn't have to be cooking - I also like men who sew, or knit, or garden, or fix cars, or refurbish their house, or a bunch of other things.

Attraction is a complex event that occurs when a lot of factors line up, but if I had to pick one single characteristic that I find most attractive in potential partners, it would be a can-do attitude. Not the cockiness of youth that screams "I'm awesome at everything, but don't you dare make me prove it!" but a quiet confidence, because you know you're a competent adult who can do a lot of things and can learn anything that you can't already do. I like people who say yes to things. Can you go buy me some tampons? Sure I can. Can you raise a child? If the situation comes up. Can you make a soufflé? Never done it before, but I'll give it a shot. Can you learn to speak Vietnamese? I don't see why not. Can we hike Mongolia on our next vacation? Sure, that sounds like fun.

I love men who can. And a man who can't cook (or clean, or sew on a button, or change a tire, or diaper a baby) is most likely not a man-who-can. Nothing wrong with that, you are what you are, but I probably won't be interested.


* I'm not saying I'd turn it down if someone offered to cook for me, mind you. I eat. I even enjoy it. I just don't adore food, the way most people I know do. I'd be happy eating the same thing every day as long as it tasted good.

This post originally appeared on www.quora.com .

A Month of Blogs - How to Make Strawberry Shortcake

How to Make Strawberry Shortcake

Suggested by Susan V.


As a writer who seems to have hit a low point in creativity and / or just getting off my ass and writing, I signed myself up to write 31 blog posts during October - one a day - on any subjects that are suggested to me. The only rules for suggestions are that they can't be anything that involve me having to take on a particular viewpoint (so no "Why I Hate Twilight" or "Why Rock Music is the Best Music") - this isn't debating class, and right now I'm not interested in trying to argue something that I may or may not agree with. Anything else goes - it can be a specific subject or a broad one, one that I've written about in the past or something new that will need research. If you're interested in playing along, you can leave a comment here, or email me at thenordicalien@gmail.com. (I'll try and remember to check there, honest!)

I promised this recipe to Susan three or four months back, and is standard for someone with short-term memory loss, promptly forgot about it. She very gently reminded me when I was looking for suggestions of topics for the October 31-day blogging challenge, so I promised I would make it my first post.

Sorry there are no pictures - strawberries aren't in season right now, although if I make the cake itself soon I'll put a photo up.

Also, a note - I tend to measure in cups. Buying a set of measuring cups is probably your best bet if you want to make any of my recipes - you can get a set from any cheap kitchen store or supermarket for a couple pounds / dollars - but if you're really too cheap and or lazy to do that, an American cup is about 2/3 of a standard British mug, or 1 1/2 times a British teacup. This recipe, as with most of the ones I use, works pretty well even if your measurements aren't exact.

The basic structure of the cake - eggs, flour, butter, sugar - comes from the 1963 edition of McCalls Cookbook, published by Random House. The flavourings are my blend.


Ingredients:

For the cake:

~ 3 cups sifted flour. In the US I use cake flour; in the UK I use half plain and half self-raising.

~ 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder. Not soda. Powder. Don't accidentally use tablespoons the way my mom did once.

~ 1 teaspoon salt.

~ 3/4 cup butter. You can use vegetable spread if you insist, although I'm a fan of butter for cakes. It's not as crucial as it would be in a finer cake though.

~ 1 1/2 cups sugar. I used to use half white and half demarara, which is nice. Now I use all unrefined since that's the only kind we buy. It's still nice. A bit less sweet.

~ 3 eggs. BUY FREE RANGE! Nothing to do with how well the recipe works, just that you should do that.

~ 1 teaspoon vanilla extract or 1/4 teaspoon vanilla essence or 1/4 teaspoon crushed vanilla pod. Do not buy anything that says "vanilla flavouring". Vanilla flavouring has no vanilla in at all. And it tastes rank.

~ 1 teaspoon almond essence. I leave this out sometimes, since my brother's allergic, but it adds a nice taste.

~ 1/2 tablespoon crushed edible lavender or 2 tablespoons lavender sugar. You can add a bit more of this if you want, but if you do, scale back a bit on the normal sugar.

~ 1 cup milk. We use semi-skimmed. I've never tried to make it with other kinds of milk, although I suppose it would work well enough. If you try, let me know how it works out.


For the topping:

~ Strawberries.

~ Vanilla ice cream (optional).

~ Whippy (aerosol) cream or pouring cream (double or single, doesn't matter).


Equipment:

~ 2 mixing bowls. At least one needs to be large-ish (14-inch diameter or larger).

~ Measuring cups and spoons.

~ Sieve.

~ Rubber spatula. Plastic works, but rubber is best. If you're not sure, get your partner to spank you with it. If it stings, it's rubbery enough. Also, when I say "spatula" I don't mean one of those lifter things with holes that some people call spatulas - I mean one of these. (They're not usually that expensive.)

~ Wooden spoon (not mandatory, but it helps).

~ Cooling rack.

~ Sharp knife.

~ Electric mixer. You CAN do it with a french whisk and wooden spoon and a heck of a lot of bicep strength (and if you do, please send me a photo), but I'd recommend the mixer.

~ Cake tin. I use a round one, although a loaf tin would probably work (although I'm not sure how you'd adjust the cooking time). If you're going for a round tin, I recommend a 7-inch diameter. (Women will most likely know what this means. Men: if you don't know, look at your round tins - or the ones in the shop - and select the one that you think is seven inches. Then choose the next size up. This is actually seven inches.) The most important thing is that it needs to be deep - at least three inches deep, four would be better.

This recipe does not work well as a layer cake.


Method:

1) Preheat your oven to 350 - 375 F / 180 - 190 C / Gas Mark 4 1/2 - 5.

2) Grease your baking tin liberally. I know a lot of people grease with oil and flour, but I find that a fairly gross method - I use butter or vegetable spread on a piece of kitchen towel and rub it all over the bottom and sides of the tin. Make sure you use quite a bit - a tablespoon, maybe a little more.

3) In your smaller bowl (if they're two different sizes), sift your flour along with your baking powder and salt. Set this to one side.

4) In your larger bowl (if you have one), use your electric mixer / superior bicep strength to beat your eggs until fluffy, then add butter, sugar, vanilla, almond and lavender. Beginners' tip: if you're having trouble measuring out your butter, fill a measuring cup 1/4 full of water, then add butter until the water's just about to overflow. I find this easier than trying to measure out a full 3/4 cup of butter, since the butter inevitably doesn't want to fill the cup without leaving empty spaces. Just make sure you don't have butter sticking over the top of the cup if you use this method.

5) At a low speed on the mixer, beat your flour mixture (in fourths) and milk (in thirds) into your butter-egg-sugar medley, beginning and ending with the flour mix. I know some people just chuck it all in together, and I suppose this might work, but I like to do it in bits because I KNOW that way works. And I'm a creature of habit, gosh darn it. You may want to use your wooden spoon to fold the batter together a few times when you add the flour mixture, so the flour doesn't all fly into the air and up your nose.

6) Pour your batter into your cake tin, using the spatula to get the last of the batter off the sides. I advise against licking the bowl - I know parents have been letting their kids eat the scrapings of raw cake batter since time immemorial, but I'm not someone who thinks salmonella is something to screw around with. That said, I have to be super-careful due to my lack of immune system, so YMMV. I know my mom eats cake batter and hasn't contracted any awful diseases yet. That we know of. Smooth the cake as much as you can on the top. It won't be totally smooth, since it's fairly viscous, but do your best.

7) Bake. The book says 30 to 35 minutes, which is a load of crap. It'll probably take an hour and a quarter. You can check it after 45 if you really must, but bear in mind that the more you check the more likely it is to sink. When it's brown on the top, check that it's cooked by poking a sharp knife in the center. If it comes out clean, it's ready. If your knife has any gooiness on it, try again in 15 minutes.

NOTE: People cooking with a fan-assisted oven, or at a high altitude, will need to adjust cooking times. I don't have a fan-assisted oven or live in the mountains, so I don't know exactly what the adjustments are, and you'll have to play around. Generally fan-assisted ovens cook things more quickly, so I'd advise checking the first time after 30 minutes if you're using one. If you're at a high altitude, it may take longer to cook. There's a formula for it (or at least for water, which boils at 1 degree F lower for every 500 feet above sea level) but I think trial and error is your best option.

8) When your knife comes out clean, let the cake rest in its pan on a cooling rack for 12 or 15 minutes.

9) After 12 or 15 minutes, run your knife around the cake where it meets the tin. Tip cake upside-down onto your hand or a plate and bang the top hard. Squeeze the sides a little if it doesn't come out. If it's really stuck, tip right way up again and run knife around the edge once more, this time wiggling the knife a little so the edges pull away from the tin. Tip upside-down and commence banging and squeezing. If you're lucky, it'll come out with very little damage. If a lot breaks off and stays stuck in the tin, you have three possibilities: a) you didn't wait long enough and the cake was too hot; b) you waited too long and the cake was too cold; or c) you didn't use enough butter when you greased the tin. Nothing you can do about it now, but you'll know next time.

10) Eat whatever's left in the tin.

11) Wash strawberries. Remove stalks, cut in half.

12) Either let your cake cool or serve it hot. Stick strawberries on top of cake, add vanilla ice cream or whippy aerosol cream or pouring cream or some variation thereof. You could even beat your cream (if it's double cream - this does not work with single cream or whippy cream) if you want. I like mine with ice cream and a squirt of whippy cream.

13) Hide from your nephews before they eat the entire thing.


For more information on high-altitude cooking, go here - http://culinaryarts.about.com/od/culinaryfundamentals/a/highaltcooking.htm  .

See anything you liked? Share it! Just link back to this page.

My Fitness Pal Blog - Day 27-52 - And Just Getting Back On Track...Maybe

Good God I've been sick lately.

Last time I wrote I mentioned that I felt flu-ish. What I thought was flu turned out to be a titanic abscess that had worked its way into my sinus cavity. Apparently bad abscesses mimic flu symptoms quite often - fever, chills, sweats, cotton wool for brains, whole body aches, nausea, that stuffed-up feeling in your sinuses. Well, maybe not usually the last part, maybe that was just the location of it.

Anyway, after weeks of feeling rough and not knowing why, and more weeks of that horrible taste in my mouth, and a few days of pain, I got rushed in for emergency surgery about three weeks ago. Which was painful and weird, because the anaesthetic only half-worked. Apparently it can be like that when you have a bad infection - something to do with the blood becoming acidic and deactivating the anaesthetic,  I dunno. I was only half awake to listen. And OH MY GOD the smell. I've worked in hospitals before, in various units (including burns and dermatology) and I've smelled some awful things, but I've seriously never smelled anything like that before. Even the nurses were gagging. They had to totally decontaminate the room after I was in there, and the smell still stuck to things. I wouldn't be surprised if they had to burn the furniture.

 I probably should not be feeling just the teeniest bit impressed with myself. Ehh, what can I say? My scientific mind is always curious. I just wish they'd been able to videotape it. Two huge, serious abscesses in the last quarter year, and I haven't been able to videotape either one. Boo.

This does, of course, raise the question of WHY I've had two huge, serious abscesses in the last quarter, when I've previously had two smaller, less serious ones in my LIFE. I have to go for blood tests, which I keep putting off. Probably the strep is behind it, it seems to be behind half of the things that have gone wrong with my health in the last year and change.

So anyway, I had the abscess drained and debrided, and then I had to go in three or four days later for a second operation to repair some of the damage and clear out the rest of the infection, and then a third one last week to build up my upper jaw again. My dentist told me last week that she thinks they've managed to save the jawbone, which is actually the first indication I had that it was really that serious.

So yeah. My exercise plan has been derailed. Again. There's always something. I have been walking, mostly doing things like grocery shopping and going to school, which does add up. Most weeks I average an hour of exercise a day, which isn't enough, but is better than nothing. I've lost three pounds, although this last week it seems to have gone back on again - I'm assuming this is only water weight due to it being the time of month, because there's no way that I've eaten enough to put on weight. I've eaten under my calorie goal every day since I started, although some days it's been very close. Other days I'm way below, which I'm trying to make myself believe is not good, because I'm still in that state of mind where less = always better, inside my head. Even though I know intellectually that this is not true. It's still very hard to reconcile what I now know to be true with what I've been taught for my whole life. I've been eating badly since I got sick - candy, sandwiches, junk food, potatoes - and while I'm always under my calorie goal, and under my fat goal 9 days in 10, I'm almost always above my sugar (although I'm not paying THAT much attention to it right now, since I go over it with a glass of orange juice and a carton of yoghurt; I'll worry more about sugar when and if I find that I'm not losing weight and / or I'm having problems with blood sugar) and never manage to get my fibre or protein. If I manage half of my daily recommendation of fibre and protein, I consider that a success, and that's not good. I'm trying. I really am. And now that I'm feeling a bit better - although not anywhere near normal, or even normal for me - I can try a bit harder each day.

I HAVE to get back to the gym, I know I feel better when I go, and I hate that I'm paying all that money for nothing when I have so little money to begin with. (It's extra tight at the moment too; I had to take two weeks off work this month with the operations, and two weeks off last month with the infections and broken jaw. I talk for a living, and I wasn't able to talk when the jaw was bad.)

Things ARE getting better though, however slowly, and they'll continue to do so. Touch wood. I just have to get my exercise and eating back on track.

The Problem With Protein

WARNING: Contains material that may be triggery, re. sexual abuse.

And with that out of the way...

I am scared of protein powders.

Probably several of you are laughing at that sentence, and that's a good thing. I approve of laughter - even in situations where it seems contraindicated, I think it's often people's best resource for holding off the dark.

Seven years ago a guy who I'd met once raped and tried to kill me. This all happened in my own home, in my own room. We'd mentioned the possibility of meeting for a drink earlier in the evening, but had never made concrete plans. So when he showed up at my door, angry and tired because he'd allegedly misunderstood the plans we made (or didn't) and traveled from London and gotten lost, I was surprised, but felt sorry enough to let him come in and spend the night.

He repeatedly raped and strangled me throughout the whole night, from about 11pm onwards. His original plan was to kill me whilst raping me, for some purposes that I won't go into here, but by 6.30 or 7am I'd pleased him enough that he decided to let me sleep for an hour or two, and then go off to work and come back later.

I did sleep, somewhat surprisingly. I was exhausted - I'd been up since 5 the previous morning, and I wasn't very well at the time. At 8 or 8.30 I was awakened by the most godawful smell. (It isn't unusual for aromas to wake me; I have a really sensitive nose and frequently wake up if my mom starts cooking.) It was a sour, slightly sweet, rotten smell, redolent of sulphur and vomit. When I opened my eyes, he was holding a bottle in front of my face with a pinky-brown, chunky substance in, and in my sleep deprived brain all I could think of was that he'd thrown up into a bottle and was now offering it to me.

He told me it was a protein shake, and that I should be drinking them. He said that he'd been really impressed with how strong I was in the night, how I'd almost fought him off (and that no girl had come so close to beating him before) and that he was going to put me on a strict regime to build my muscles and make me sleek and strong and teach me how to fight other people and win. That he could train me well. I think I was supposed to be flattered here. I'm not really sure.

Anyway, since then I've avoided protein shakes and powders like the plague. But I think it's time for me to get over that. Looking back at my diaries for the last month, it's a rare day when I even come near to my protein goals. I've tried upping them with foods, but I'm mildly intolerant of eggs (can eat one or two a week without symptoms, not more) and nuts (it's not a bad allergy like some people have, but I don't feel particularly well if I eat them more than occasionally - although I am going to try almond milk) and dairy (I can have cheese or milk once a day max unless I want major stomach cramps, although yoghurt doesn't seem to be a problem) and while I do eat meat, I can't afford to eat much. We're poor. Like, super-poor. I can afford to eat 1-2 oz of supermarket value brand chicken or pork 4-5 days a week, and beef on rare occasions. I'm allergic to seafood, although I manage to eat one particular brand of canned tuna.

And yes, I have tried siphoning money away from other things to pay for better food, but the only indulgences I have left that I could possibly give up are uni tuition, life insurance (I'm a full-time carer for my disabled mother, and worry about how she would survive if something happened to me) and my gym membership.

So it's time for me to start supplementing my diet. I want to try cutting the meat out, or at least severely down, so I'm looking around for trial packs (either free or not costing much) so I can find a protein powder that isn't going to trigger PTSD flashbacks when I smell it. A friend posted something about Sunwarrior lately, which is nicely serendipitous. They look very good, but I still don't want to spend forty bucks* on a kilo of the stuff until I've made sure the smell is okay.

Although - it's chocolate-flavoured. Which sways me a bit. :)

* Still cheaper than meat, though. And probably better for me.

My Fitness Pal Blog - Day 22-25 - And Getting Impatient

Come on scales. Arrive already.

Thank you. That is all.

Yeah, I can't get away with posting that little. It's hard, though. I'm not someone who feels like they can really track their progress without having the numbers in front of me. At this point, taking measurements of things like waist and hips is fairly useless - with the intestinal blockage, my stomach measurement can vary as much as eight inches in A DAY - so I'm really needing to rely on weight to see if I've actually lost anything. And they haven't arrived. I paid Amazon a fortune for what should have been express delivery, and ordered on the 26th...and I got an email the other day saying to expect them on the 8th of January. FFS.

Everything else is - well, slow. I've had these awful pains in my upper back and shoulders for a couple weeks now. At first I thought I could exercise it out, so I tried that, but then it got a lot worse. So I rested. And it still gets worse. I'm a bit lost as to what it is - usually when I pull a muscle (or more than one) it heals in a week or so, and this has been getting slowly but surely worse for two, maybe two and a half weeks now. It's worse when I get up, so I suppose I'll have to buy some new pillows and see if that helps at all. Might be something to do with my body recovering from the infections. I know that when I'm getting over one, I often get a whole load of hypersensitive nerves once my immune system gets back online.

I saw the dentist today, although she didn't do any treatment. She says she doesn't want to do any more tooth work for at least eight weeks, unless there's an emergency - the jaw needs time to heal. Which kind of sucks, in a way, because I have an infection (no real pain unless I bite on it, but awful taste and stinky breath) in one of my upper back teeth. The idea of walking around with halitosis for eight weeks is not a thrilling one, but I don't see that there's much I can do - I brush and floss and use mouthwash, then two minutes later I smell again, or at least I can smell and taste myself. Ugh. Unless it starts to hurt, though, stinky breath and a taste that makes me nauseous is (supposedly) preferable to chancing more damage to the mandible.

Sigh.

It's been a pretty exhausting couple weeks. It's just like, as soon as I get one thing feeling a bit better, something else starts up, you know? All my good intentions about health get scuppered because I can't seem to rid my body of infection. It was like this after the strep in Oct 2011 - I'd manage to get one part of my body feeling reasonably good and then it'd crop up elsewhere. But short of paying for a private hospital stay and IV antibiotics there's not much I can do aside from rest, exercise and eat cleanly. Which I haven't been great at doing. It's a vicious cycle with me - eating decent food requires energy, for shopping, for preparation, and sometimes for chewing and swallowing. At the worst points in my illness, I starved not because I was trying to not eat, but because I literally did not have the energy to chew and swallow food.

I'm also coming down onto the half dosage of my daily meds, which is going to be hard for a month or two. I was happily adjusted to the half dose, but when I got the eye abscess in October last year, it was so excruciating that I had to increase to the full dosage of painkillers. That was supposed to be temporary, but after the eye abscess was the broken jaw, and the infected socket, and then the ear infections...and now it's gone on for two and a half months, and it's going to take a lot of effort to get back to the half dose again.

So yeah, things are hard right now. I'm exhausted and swing between being ravenous all the time, and not having any appetite at all.

But there's nothing to do but keep plugging away, I guess. Things will get better soon, once I'm sleeping better.

My Fitness Pal Blog - Day 12 Through 21 - And Just Barely Feeling Alive

Freaking infections.

I don't know if I'm allowed to say the other F word on MFP, so we'll try and keep the language to a minimum, at least until I'm less worried about getting kicked off. But seriously. F that S. Or something. 

The infected jaw hung around for about ten days. The amoxicillin I got for it hung around a lot longer. The ear infection (right ear) that I got the day I came off the amoxicillin has had me deaf, dizzy and in a crapload of pain (although not as much as the jaw), the ear infection (left ear) that feels like it might start up tomorrow doesn't hurt yet but feels full and weird, and the thing that I assume is an abscess that's above the top left molar that I had filled, or maybe root canalled, two years ago, is giving the most disgusting sweet rotten taste in my mouth that I've ever had, and makes me want to keep shoving food in there just to kill the taste.

No, brushing and using mouthwash doesn't work. Two minutes after the Corsodyl  - which is about the strongest one you can get in the UK, and is miles better than Listerine, or so I'm told by both my dentist and my third-year dental student BFF - the taste is back.

Luckily I have an appointment with the dentist on Jan 3rd, so in the absence of any real pain, I think I can hang on till then. Even if the taste makes me feel eulgh.

Oh, and on top of that - there was Christmas to deal with. Right?

Christmas was fine. The family dinner on the 23rd was fine. Christmas Day, just mom and me at home, was fine. Christmas shopping was fine. I'm in that post-infection, post-antibiotic downer place where nothing quite feels right or makes me jump for joy (not to mention the fact that my normal meds aren't working so my muscles are killing me, and I'm constantly swinging between baking and freezing which is enough to get any person down) but nothing went wrong. My family didn't eat each other. Everyone seemed to like their presents. My mom gave me a totally awesome Imperia pasta maker with attachments for ravioli and gnocchi, as well as some books (which I have already read, all 900-some pages; I've stayed in bed a lot since I've been feeling so rotten) and other incidentals. Papa and Stepmama sent me a nice check, with instructions to spend it on something really nice that makes me happy - so as usual, I will spend it on this semester's tuition. I can't help it, I'm horrendously practical, and tuition makes me happy. My brother's family gave me the textbook I need for school this year, which I'm thrilled about - no more working off photocopies. All in all, presents were great. Everything I got is stuff I asked for and can use - candles, writing paper, kitchen equipment. Don't get me wrong, I love it when people buy me pretty things to store away for when I have a place of my own, but I'm starting to run out of places to keep all the boxes of stuff I have. It's really nice to have stuff I can actually use now.

I did some sale shopping, and was fairly restrained, buying things that I NEEDED rather than pretty things that I liked and decided I had to have. Earrings were my one frivolous indulgence - they're sprays of shooting stars on long chains, from Kurt Geiger. There's several more things in the KG store that I'd like, but I'm running out of money. I bought ridiculously beautiful, ridiculously expensive calf-high leather boots from Jones - £75, down from £150, down from some price I don't want to say - and even though they took most of my non-tuition Christmas money AND most of the money I had left in the bank after bills and Christmas shopping, I'm thrilled with them. I haven't had calf-high boots for a decade or more - because of the amount of walking I do, and also probably because of the ballet and cheerleading as a kid and teen, my calf muscles are ridiculous. There's hardly any fat on them, and even when I'm slimmer I look like I'm packing cantaloupes. So I haven't found any boots to fit since I was about 17 - but Jones had a pair that I could ALMOST do up. When I got them home, I panicked for a day and a bit, because they'd weatherproofed them for me and it had made them shrink a bit. I couldn't get the zippers done up at all, and I was a wreck. But then I discovered that I was trying to pull them too far up my legs, and if I let them crinkle a bit at the ankle - which, I'm told, is a perfectly acceptable way to wear boots - they zip just fine. They feel good on, too. I need to write about the boots in detail, because they affect my mental state so much. All I'll say for now is that it's damn good not to have cold, wet feet - here in England it rains all the freaking time, and I've been wandering around with wet feet for two winters now, ever since I started relying on public transport.

I do need to see if I can do some exercises to slim my calves a bit, maybe lengthen the muscles. Or at the very least, stop walking on an incline all the time - years of hiking mountains and cliffsides, followed by years of walking and jogging on a treadmill at a 40-degree incline, are probably as much to blame for my calves as the ballet. :)

I've been under my calorie goal all over Christmas (although I still haven't found the recipes mom used for a couple things on the family dinner day, so I haven't logged them yet) but I've been basically eating crap. I don't eat well the majority of the time anyway - too much sugar and simple carbs, not anywhere near enough protein or fibre -  but over Christmas a lot of it has been sandwiches and junk food. In theory, staying under the calorie goal should make the difference in my weight whether I eat crap or not, but it's not doing my body any good.

I won't know, though, until my scales arrive. I bought some really nice ones from Amazon, and I'm hoping they arrive tomorrow (Monday) - if not, then it'll be after New Years Day.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.

My Fitness Pal Blog - Day 8, 9, 10, 11 - And Stuck in Bed

Oy veh. What a week. Monday went reasonably well - I wasn't feeling quite right, so I wasn't very active, but I helped to clean Mom's room and took a walk. And ate several hundred calories of cheese balls, which made me feel like shit, so I've made a mental note not to buy those again.

Monday night my jaw started acting up for the fourth time. I broke the jaw - well, we *think* I broke the jaw - during a difficult tooth extraction six weeks ago. The socket gave me extreme pain for a week, which I stupidly didn't get sorted until five days after the extraction. I recognise that I have a huge problem when it comes to seeking medical help. I do it, I just don't do it quickly enough. I was sick throughout my childhood - I have almost no immune system - and when I got fibromyalgia when I was 12, the stock response that I got from a lot of doctors, a few teachers, and my parents, was that I was either making up the pain and tiredness to get attention, or more likely that I genuinely didn't feel well but was greatly exaggerating it to get off school. It didn't help that the illness was so unpredictable; I might have no energy for a day or a few days or a few weeks, and then I'd perk up and feel almost normal for a while. Things are better now (not perfect, but better); more doctors see fibromyalgia as a legitimate illness, and I've come past the teen years where everything I said was automatically suspect. (Somewhat unfairly, I must say; I was a ridiculously responsible teenager in most respects.) But it's left me with this wait-and-see mentality, where I avoid seeking medical care until I'm sure that a problem is serious enough to bother a doctor (or dentist) about.

Having nearly died fourteen months ago from strep throat that went systemic during the time I was waiting to see (although I was waiting for other reasons then) you'd think I would have learned my lesson. But as my doctor back them told me, even heavy-duty antibiotics can't cure stupidity.

So after the extraction, I didn't see the dentist for five days. Partly because they don't work weekends, partly because I'd never had a tooth extracted and had no idea what degree of pain was normal (the fibromyalgia has also left me with a tendency to think that I'm overexaggerating my pains, although in reality I'm probably understating them. Regardless, I don't have a reliable yardstick for what kind of pain is normal pain and what kind needs to be investigated) but mostly just because I'm an idiot. I kept checking for a dry socket (which I thankfully did not have) but it turned out I had a nasty infection instead. She packed it with antibiotic / anaesthetic gauze, gave me a prescription for metronidazole and sent me home. The metronidazole was harsh on my stomach, but the tooth cleared up. Until the day after I finished the 7-day course, I went to eat a sandwich, opened my mouth a little wider than normal, and screamed in pain. Of course, it was Friday lunchtime and we couldn't get a dentist appointment for love nor money. Tried all day Friday and all day Saturday, by which point my face had swelled up like a chipmunk, and finally got an emergency dentist who said to come in on Sunday morning.

Sunday I woke up and it felt fine. Go figure.

A similar thing happened two other times, both at times when I couldn't get a dentist, both after I opened my mouth to eat solid food. In the normal order of things, I eat small bites, and I don't open my mouth very wide when I'm talking. The only times I open wide are to eat baguettes or burgers or hot dogs (a fairly rare occurrence) or to floss my teeth - which it turned out was what caused the pain to start up again the last three times. I was told not to floss for a couple weeks after the extraction, but what with the jaw pain I haven't been able to floss properly, right to the back, in six weeks, and it's driving me mad.

Luckily the two times before this, the problem righted itself within a day or two, as long as I kept the jaw immobilised. The socket's been oozing pus for weeks, but without any real pain, except for when I pull out bone sequestra (which, I'm sorry to say, are green. Yuck). But then this started up Monday night, just mildly at first, and I thought it would sort itself out...but it didn't.

Tuesday, Mom and I went to the Galleria, a shopping mall in Hatfield (the next town over, and home to my university). We don't have a mall in my town, only high street shops and a couple of outdoor parades, so I'm always happy to get some mall time. It was a bit sad - all the malls around here look pretty empty since the economy tanked - but it still would have been fun if the jaw hadn't totally taken over. I thought that if I went out and distracted myself I'd notice it less, but I actually seemed to notice it MORE. I walked a lot that day - three hours, plus the time walking back and forth between bus stops - so it wasn't a total loss as far as exercise was concerned, even if I did eat McDonalds for lunch. (I eat McDonalds three or four times a year, but boy do I love it.) And I bought a present for my sister, and one for my nephew, and two for Mom, so I only have my little sisters left now. (I saw some things in Kurt Geiger that they'd like, but the problem is actually going out to get them when I'm on the verge of screaming half the time.)

Wednesday and today I slept for the majority of the day. I ate crappy food. I stayed under my calorie count, but both Tuesday and today (Thursday) I went over my fat allowance. Only by 2 or 3 grams each time, but considering that most days I eat between a third and two thirds of my fat allowance - I am not someone who's really into greasy food - it was a bit of a bummer. Oh well, I'll live.

I'm not sure I'll survive the jaw, or the aches in my body from not exercising, but that's another issue. :)

I saw the dentist this morning. She couldn't see a break on the x-ray, but she only did a tooth x-ray instead of a whole head. If the problem continues, I'll have to push for a full head one, but I don't think my reduced fees will cover it and it'll cost me ￡150. Hopefully they'll let me pay in instalments if it comes to that, because any money I get for Christmas has to go to paying next semester's tuition; I only have three weeks left in this semester after we go back after Christmas. I think the next semester starts the first week of February.

She gave me more antibiotics - amoxicillin this time - bringing my total to three courses in two months. Hell. I always feel depressed during a course, and for a couple weeks after, since they seem to mess with my brain chemicals. I've only just got happy again after the last course five weeks ago.

I wish Curt were here. My BFF is in his third year of dentistry at Bristol uni, but he also works full time, drives between Bristol and London on Fridays and Sundays, and has a wife who requires much time and attention. I need him here for moral support and cuddles and to talk me through the medical side of things, but it'd be selfish to tell him that.

On a slightly happier note, mom has volunteered to buy me one of the dresses I want, that have now gone on half-price sale. (The one I really want is not on sale, natch.)

I just have to lose the twenty pounds it'll take for the first and the fifty pounds it'll take to look good in the second and third. :)

My Fitness Pal Blog - Day 7 - And Pondering the Crossed Wires Between Head and Heart

I don't make my food diaries public - or at least I haven't yet - for a couple of reasons. The reasons being that a) some days I feel like I'm eating too much, and b) some days I think I'm eating the right amount until I look at the figures and they don't look good.

Today's diary, as of 8pm - although I will go eat something now - reads (for calories):

Goal 2190
Food 787
Exercise 971
Net -184
Remaining 2374

I expect to get yelled at for that (and probably rightly so). Intellectually I know that these numbers are really bad. Viscerally, they feel good. To me, denying yourself things - whether it's food, sleep, companionship, sex, love - has always felt good. I wonder if this is what anorexia is like for most people.

Yes, I have an excellent therapist. Yes, we're working on it.

It's not as simple as that, of course, because having things also feels good, in a different part of my brain and heart. Having food I enjoy, having love, having great sex, having friends - these are all things that fill me with joy. I often feel like I'm a split personality: part of me revels in the world and all it has to offer, and part of me shuns it entirely, much like a hermit in the old days. I'd have done well as a self-flagellating monk in the Middle Ages, or maybe a warrior in ancient Japan.

I have phases of each. Sometimes I love people and brightness and life, and I soak up energy from the city and the world; I feel the vitality around me and I feel rejuvenated by being around others. And then I have periods where the world baffles and angers me, not because of anything that's happened but just because my brain chemistry messes up. When I feel like this, it's not irritation or anger with any kind of focus; it's not because I hate the government or the weather or racism or homophobia or Mitt Romney or the banks or consumerism. I just hate people, hate the fact that human lives take so much maintenance, hate that we have to eat and drink and brush our teeth and exercise and go to work and sleep and clean houses and talk and breathe and then the next day we have to do it all again. When I'm in a phase like this, I find it monstrously unfair that we have to keep eating and sleeping and breathing and we never get a moment's rest to just stop; I hate that people are constantly scurrying around like ants, rushing from Big Important Thing to Big Important Thing and yet never really getting anything done, and I just want to turn myself into a mountain and sit and ignore the ants for the next twenty thousand years.

This split-personality thing has been going on since I was brain damaged in an accident six, nearly seven, years ago. My brain works in funny ways now. I'm not ACTUALLY a split personality; I don't believe that I'm two different people. I just have different personalities that come out at different times.

Or perhaps just one strange, complex personality. :)

For all that, I'm a fairly cheerful person most of the time. When I feel like a mountain, I shut myself in my room and read for a few days, and then I'm okay. It usually happens when I'm recovering from a bad illness or infection, and my serotonin levels - low at the best of times - are running on empty.

As for the food - I know I have to eat, so I do. I don't hate food. I like food. I just feel guilty eating it. Since early childhood, I've felt that things like food and sleep are indulgences rather than necessities - things that you can have on occasion, but that you must always be grateful for, and not take for granted, and ensure that you're not greedy with them because you don't really NEED them. I have no explanation for where this idea came from, although Dr Chris and I are working on it.

With some things in life, I've learned that you have to divorce your intellectual knowledge from your gut feelings. First with the head, then with the heart - but if they're at an impasse, go with the head. My instincts tell me I don't need to eat or sleep - or sometimes even breathe - but my rational brain tells me that I have to. So I do. Not always well, but I do.

My Fitness Pal Blog - Day 6 - And Extremely Lazy

I so nearly had a useless day today. I fell asleep at 8am, finally feeling okay after a night of allergies and overactive libido (sorry, TMI) and figured I'd sleep until 12ish...and woke up at 6pm. I guess I needed the sleep. I don't set alarms when I'm recovering from an illness unless I have something pressing to do, and I'm free from now until New Years. 

Oh, not FREE free - I have to clean my room and the bathroom, buy six more presents, wrap all the presents, write another half dozen cards for family, write the rest of mom's cards or she'll forget, bake three or four things, make herbal bath stuff for my sisters, make cough medicine since I just know I'm going to get a cold any day, buy food, and try to arrange a trip to Somerset to see my Da and Stepmama. And I'm contracted for 3 12-hour shifts a week, with possible overtime during the holidays. But none of those things are tied to a particular day or time, and I can arrange my schedule as necessary.

Which is helpful on the days that my inner vampire takes over and I sleep until sundown.

It's funny, when I was a teenager I used to be obsessed with vampires. Particularly the L.J. Smith variety. There was a vamp-rush in teenage literature when I was in primary and secondary school, from about 1992 until 1998. Then nothing until they came back into popularity in the mid-to-late 2000s. I loved them when I was a teen because the brooding tortured soul thing seemed so romantic. Now all I can think is how CONVENIENT it would be to have vampires running all-night gyms and shopping malls. I don't know how things are in the US, but here in St Albans, England, we roll up the sidewalks at 10, aside from bars and clubs. Even restaurants close at 10 or 11. There are superstores you can go to for shopping 24 hours Mon thru Fri - if you have a car - but no libraries or gyms or swimming pools or leisure facilities. London is better, but not by much, and you certainly can't go and exercise at 3am, except for a couple places like Liverpool Street. Winter nocturnals like me find daily chores hard going. Summer is fine, but during the winter I mostly sleep days.

So what was the point of this? Oh, a useless day. Or nearly useless. I was going to clean my room, but the whole thing takes four hours - six if I do the closet - because my allergies won't allow me to do a half-assed job. I was craving crazy amounts of sugar too - I ate eight cookies (little cookies, maybe 30 calories each, but still) and a slice of Pandoro and coffee with sugar and cream. My sugar intake is something I need to seriously look into after Christmas; my daily diaries have been quite pleasing aside from the sugar. On most days I'm eating half of my daily fat and sat fat, and am well under my calories - and no yelling about that, please; after a lifetime of eating disorders I'm doing the best I can on that front, and I can't (financially) afford to eat more protein than I do - but I couldn't figure out why my sugars were so high, even on days when I don't eat cookies or candy, until I learned that a glass of orange juice (with no added sugar) has my RDA of sugar in it, and a carton of probiotic yoghurt puts me right over. I need to do more research on this and find out how much fruit sugars count, because I'm really not happy to give up orange juice unless I have no other choice.

In any case, I'm not changing too much until after Christmas. I want to see what I eat normally, and find out exactly how bad my diet is for a few weeks before I start changing it. And the scales at my gym have disappeared, and I can't afford to buy a pair for home until after Christmas.

Excuses? Perhaps, but still true ones. Losing weight is always easier under optimal conditions, but we make the best of what we have, and what I have is a minimum-wage job and a disabled mother and not enough money to go and spend ￡30 on a decent pair of scales for myself until I've bought presents for everyone else. :)

It's okay, though. I'm still exercising, still trying to get healthy - I'm just not going as hard as I'd like to be.

So yeah, a useless day. I did take a walk this evening for 40 mins. It's 7 Celsius outside - much more comfortable than the -5 that I was walking in on Tuesday - but the damp really gets to my bones, and makes me feel rotten. I don't function well in damp, either warm or cold.

I'm still pretty happy with the overall exercise this week, though. I signed up for the MOVE IT! Challenge - a pledge to do at least 180 minutes of exercise a week, preferably 360 or more - and I thought I wouldn't be able to commit to 360, but I've already managed 512 minutes this week with a day still to go. Running for the bus adds up, I guess.

Recipes - Tuna-Pasta Salad

Tuna-Pasta Salad

WARNING: Must be made the day before you plan to eat it!

Ingredients:

1 can John West tuna chunks in sunflower oil (234)

1/2 medium onion (23)

1/4 cucumber (11)

2 tbsp Hellman's mayonnaise (180)

300g (dry weight) farfalle pasta (1071)

1/4 tsp dried oregano (1)


Method:

1) Cook pasta until as preferred. I like it soft (but not soggy) for this recipe; you may prefer al dente (firm).

2) Drain tuna. Press out as much oil as possible without cutting your fingers on the can.

3) Pick over the tuna to remove the black scaly bits. Only necessary if you're a fusspot like me.

4) Dice veg. Size is not really important, although I usually make 0.5cm x 0.5cm chunks.

5) Chuck everything in a bowl. Mix around.

6) Season with salt and pepper as needed.

7) Cover and leave in fridge overnight. This is very important. It doesn't taste right if you eat it the day you make it. I suppose you could probably get away with making it early morning and eating it for a late dinner, but I'd strongly suggest making the day before.

Serves 4...or one person four times. :) 380 calories a serving (according to My Fitness Pal).

You can reduce calories (a bit) by using tuna in spring water instead of oil and light mayonnaise. I don't like light mayo, and am allergic to most kinds of tuna, which is why I've specified the ones I have. You can use any brand, though.

You can also mess around with ingredient quantities. I often use less pasta and two cans of tuna / twice the veggies if I feel like I need more protein and vitamins. I think it's yummier with less pasta, personally, but it does make it quite a bit more expensive, and I'm on a budget. As this recipe stands, it costs about £4 / $8 - so £1 / $2 a serving.

My Fitness Pal Blog - Day 3, 4 and 5 - And In The Weeds

I knew that I'd fall behind with exercise Wed through Fri. After all, I'm behind with everything else. :p Tuesday night / Wednesday morning I didn't sleep well - I'm not sleeping well at all right now, and I'd hoped that eating better and getting more fresh air would help, but so far I'm not seeing a difference - and I spent the morning from 10-2 in bed asleep, after doing paperwork most of the night. Then I started rushing around. I did some Christmas shopping - the only way I can see to get it done this year is to go for an hour or so every day that I can, since I don't have the stamina to stay out for too long - and bought groceries and had my hair cut.

The girl who'd cut my hair three or four times had left the salon, and I didn't get the voicemail message they left me, so I have a new stylist. And I have to say, I'm quite smitten with him. Usually when I get my hair cut I read a book or just close my eyes and enjoy the feeling of having people do things to me, but he made it a very interactive experience. It was fun. And not scary. Usually I find beauticians of all types to be a little intimidating, perhaps because they've made a career out of doing things where I struggle with the basics. But Sam was awesome. I have a total platonicrush. He made me feel pretty. And he taught me how to do some of it for myself - not that I can guarantee I'll remember - and ordered me to bring in any styling aids I have next time I see him, and he'll teach me how to use those too, and "we'll have a girls' night in." His words, not mine.

It's funny, I swing between loving and hating this girl thing. My mom doesn't do hair or makeup, and both my parents have the traditional intellectual's bemused condescension for anything to do with beauty and appearance, so I grew up clueless. I dabbled with hair and makeup in high school, because the other girls did, and I've always liked pretty clothes. But for the most part, I've done the bare minimum that would keep me looking like a girl instead of a northern rocker (I do pluck my eyebrows, or I end up with Liam Gallagher unibrow) or an old English sheepdog.

But now and then someone will do my hair or my makeup or my nails and I'll realise, hey, I do actually have some potential under here. And then I'll think that the girl thing might be fun.

Thursday I had class - the last before Christmas - so I spent the morning baking for the Christmas party. That was a challenge. I made applesauce-spice squares, and had a panic when I couldn't work out why each square appeared to have 200 calories in, until I realised that someone had entered Colman's applesauce in the database as having 3000-some calories in a jar. WTF, even in my eating-disordered brain, where every food other than water and steamed vegetables is trying to give me heart disease, applesauce does not have 3000 calories in a jar. Turns out that the squares are 86 calories each, which is just fine, although the sugar content's high.

I also made chocolate chip cookies, but didn't end up sharing them out since Julia brought the same. (Turned out I COULD have shared them out, since hers were more like shortbread and mine were more like thin crisps, but oh well.)

The party was a bigger challenge than the baking. My cake squares, Julia's cookies, Andrew's Christmas cake and Wensleydale cheese, Sam's battenburgs and jam tarts, Takana's Doritos, Toni's Pringles...yeah. I ate one cookie, half a piece of Christmas cake, one mini battenburg, three Doritos, three Pringles and two pieces of the most beautiful sushi I'd ever seen, prepared by John. I have to say, I'm happy to find that I can eat and enjoy sushi, at least if it's vegetarian. With my immune system, I have to avoid raw fish (actually, I avoid most cooked fish too, I get allergies) and even the vegetarian stuff you find in supermarkets tastes to me of nothing but seaweed. I loathe seaweed. Although I have eaten at Nobu before, and some of their stuff is good. John's sushi, however, was incredible. It looked amazing, too - he'd made pink hearts out of rice that he'd dyed with beetroot juice, and green rice cakes with Christmas trees on top made of mange tout beans. Unfortunately the only picture I got was horribly blurry. I was going to take another one, but then I went to the bathroom and when I came back, most of the sushi was gone. :D

And wasabi...*drools*. There is never enough wasabi in the world.

Today was much like Wednesday, minus the haircut. Groceries. Post office. I ended up writing half a dozen cards and envelopes for a little old Chinese lady who approached me when she was having trouble writing the western letters. This happens more often than you might expect - not necessarily little old Chinese ladies, but strangers needing help. I guess I just look approachable. Anyway, she had ten or twenty words of English, and I have far less than that of either Mandarin or Cantonese - Japanese is the only Asian language I speak at all these days, and I don't speak that very well - but I think we managed. Either that, or some very surprised people are going to be getting Christmas cards.

The plus side of not having access to a car is that you have to walk everywhere, and walking burns calories. The minus side...uh, there are a lot of minus sides. One of which being that it takes forever to get anything done, so you're on the go for much of the day and you still manage to complete far fewer chores than your four-wheeled - or even two-wheeled - friends. Curt often asks me what I've done today, and when I tell him, he's like, "Is that all?" Uh, yeah. It's a 5 1/2 or 6-hour round trip to go to my 2-hour class. It's usually an hour each way, 45 mins minimum, just to get to the gym.

Another minus is that in the winter, your feet constantly feel like they're about to drop off. I need to buy boots, but it's taking me forever to save up the money.

Hopefully I can get back to the gym tomorrow - even with having to get there and back, the thought of running in a warm, bright room is much more tempting than walking for an hour or two outside.

My Fitness Pal Blog - Day 2 - And Trying Not to Panic

No gym today - my work schedule is keeping me up nights and then I sleep from 10am until about 4, sometimes later. 6 hours is really not enough sleep for me, but it's all I can justify taking. I did walk briskly - almost a jog - for 35 minutes, although that was sort of by default; mom borrowed and misplaced the NYPD hoodie I wear to run, and when I went to the garage I had to wear the lightweight cotton spring / autumn one - not nearly warm enough when it's -5 Celsius.

There won't be any gym tomorrow or Thursday either; tomorrow I have to go to the post office, buy Christmas presents, get my hair cut and bake something for the class party we're having Thursday. Fibromyalgia is a bitch. When you have quite a nasty version of it, the way I do, it's often all you can do to get the necessary things done, and a lot falls by the wayside. You have to prioritise. In my case, my exercise schedule and my social life have been smashed to smithereens. If you have six things to do and only enough energy to do three of them, your energy goes on things like looking after mom and bathing and grocery shopping and school, and the stuff like exercise and dating and keeping in touch with friends disappears. I don't really have many friends anymore. They all vanished when I was dying last year. I just didn't have any time or energy to offer them - it all went on taking care of mom and staying alive.

I spent a miserable day today staring at nutrition labels. I used to go by the mantra that if it needs an ingredient and nutrition label, I probably don't want to be eating it, but that was back when only processed foods were labeled. These days, everything has labels, so I actually have to read them.

Early in the morning I discovered that the pizza I like to eat once a week or so - my main food indulgence - contained nearly four thousand calories in a pack. Four thousand! For cheese, flour, eggs, butter and marinara sauce! Even a mouthful would have more calories than I like to eat in a MEAL. Pizza had to go. (I didn't actually throw it out; I've been poor my whole life and still can't bear the thought of throwing food away, but I did put it in a bag to offer to the neighbours tomorrow.)

Tonight I was struck down by killer PMS - making this the second time in five weeks, after almost six years of my mirena coil making periods almost nonexistent; clearly the hormone has now run out - and found myself staring mournfully into the freezer to see if there was some chicken or something I could oven-bake. We're almost out of food stores in the house, so no chicken. On the plus side, when I looked at the pizza box again I realised that tiredness and stupidity earlier had caused me to read the kJ instead of the calories, and that there were 800 kCal in a pack rather than nearly 4000. At 800 calories, it's still not a food I can eat often, but I don't have to ban it from the house upon pain of death either.

I cried. I blame the PMS, since I am not aware of ever having cried about food before. Then I ate some pizza.

My Fitness Pal Blog - Day 1 - And Already Floundering

Sometimes you need a thing in black and white in front of you if you're going to believe it at all.

I joined My Fitness Pal yesterday, after the shocking discovery that my Christmas skirt - which previously needed to be pinned to stop it falling down - wouldn't zip up. It's supposed to be a good site. It's set out well, and it's easy to enter your food and exercise either on the site or the iPhone app (and I assume android, BB and tablet apps), and track your progress. In fact, I'd say it's a brilliant site.

Except that I'm flummoxed by what it's telling me.

I have it right there in front of me. At my weight, assuming I have a normal metabolic rate, I need to eat 2190 calories. I don't know if this is to maintain my weight, or to lose a pound a week (my goal) or what; it certainly can't be to stay alive.

In one (short) gym session - walking to the gym, 25 minutes of various cardio (each bit of which I put in individually: 10 minutes of walking at 4.5 mph, another 5 minutes of walking interspersed with jogging 7.5 mph, 7 minutes on the crosstrainer, resistance 8 at 10 rpm), 3 minutes of cool-down walking), getting home from the gym - I burned off 525 calories. That's a baby-step session, the kind I do in the first week back after being sick in bed. And it's a low estimate for calories, because I couldn't input the 15 minutes of stretches, or the fact that the first 10 minutes of walking was on a 40-degree incline.

If I eat the sandwich and fruit that I got for dinner - which I'm currently not hungry for - I will have eaten 705 calories today, netting me +180. The app is telling me that this means I'm running at a 2010-calorie deficit.

I'll admit I don't understand this calorie thing. I was always told, stay under a thousand and burn off more than you put in. I've only burned 525, so I still have 180 more to burn if I'm just to break even, right? But now I'm told that bodies burn off 1000-2000, depending on weight, just to keep the blood pumping and organs working. I'm not sure if you're supposed to figure that into your output or not.

The site seems very sure that I'm running at a deficit, but if that's happening - and this is not an average, but also not an unusual day, and I don't think I eat much more than 1000, occasionally 1200, on most days - then I don't understand why I'm not thin. Half the people I talk to talk about starvation mode, and the other half say it's a myth.

I've never believed it myself, but considering that I eat less than a thousand and currently weigh 264 lbs, maybe there's something to it.

I get that I have an eating disorder. I've had it 23 years. I understand that. The fact that 700 calories a day seems normal to me is proof of that. It'd be easier if the world would agree on whether I need to eat more or eat less in order to lose weight, but whatever, that's not the world's responsibility. It's my responsibility.

I dunno, I guess I need to talk to a dietician. And to Hot Personal Trainer Guy - who I'm not dating, but have occasional liaisons with - and see if he can help me set up a better exercise regime that'll get my metabolic rate up. I've been doing the interval thing - walking with brief intervals of running - because it's supposed to increase your metabolism, and I'll get back to weights in a week or so, but I need something else.

Sigh. It's a long road. I think I'm hungry, but then I've thought that I'm hungry since I was five. I don't even know what's real and what's in my head nowadays.

Edit: I ate two chicken fajitas and the bag of grapes I bought, and two pieces of puff pastry with cream and jam (why did I start this thing two weeks before Christmas?!) but not the melon or the sandwich. It's now 1.40am, and I've realised that the site will automatically add anything after midnight to the next day's food, so I'll have to consider a day to be from midnight to midnight rather than bedtime to bedtime the way I've previously done. Anyway, I had fajitas, grapes and napoleons for dinner, bringing the day's calories to 1036 - meaning I'm running 1679 behind.

I guess I need to go look at sugars, general carbs, fats and proteins now.

This whole thing is overwhelming.

Detox, Finally - Day 1

Starting the detox off gently - about half-and-half normal foods and health foods - in the hopes that it doesn't shock my system too badly. I do NOT want a repeat of the boils I had last time, for example.

I'm not really supposed to be doing this until this round of tests is complete, but I can't seem to complete them (for reasons that I will not go into here, for the sake of politeness - although if you've been following the saga you can probably read between the lines) and I simply can NOT go on the way I've been going, not feeling as bad as I have.

So.

Day 1 - Wednesday 15th August:

Lunch:

4 squares bitter dark chocolate
1 apple
1 satsuma
50g fresh coconut
50g raw pumpkin seeds (hulled)
1 coconut flavour yoghurt (Perle du Lait - not probiotic)

Dinner:
1 Innocent veg pot (Caribbean curry with mango & rice)
1/2 glass orange juice (150 ml)
1 apricot Activia (probiotic)

Health: I can feel the start of die-off. Brain is fogged...can't...stay...awake...

Now, aren't you glad you just wasted ninety seconds of your life reading this note?

Catch A Falling Star And Put It In Your Pocket...

...Save it for a rainy day.


I feel like I should have a buffer of rainy day stars. Or posts. I did write a bunch awhile back, actually, but I seem to have filed them somewhere where I can't find them. Presumably while under the influence of insomnia. Just silly posts, things like lists of my favorite obnoxious T-shirts, and the things I love best about Autumn, and random thoughts that don't have to be tied into Events, either in the world in general or in my life. Things I can post whenever, just to let y'all know that I haven't deserted you.

Yeah, I'm still alive. Just about.

Been a while, hasn't it?

It's not so much that I don't have anything to write about, it's more that I can't quite get my thoughts and feelings out.

I want to tell you about heartbreak and idiot ex-boyfriends who come and seduce you and then afterwards admit to you that they're still with their girlfriend, and they're still not "supposed" to be talking to you. And also of the idiot girls who fall for their shit for the third time unlucky.

I want to tell you about the people who've jacked me around lately, and how mad I am that so many of the people who are supposed to be close to me totally fail to respect the fact that my time is precious - I have little enough of it - and when I get mad because I get stood up five times in six weeks, after frantically rescheduling things because you begged to see me, I'm not angry because we didn't get to have fun after all, I'm angry because the message behind your actions is that you think that YOUR free time is more valuable than MINE.

I want to tell you about how, more and more, I'm finding myself resenting people because they don't have the same value systems that I do. And how much I hate that resentment, because I don't want to be that girl who dislikes people for being different - but at the same time, I can't help being mad when I try so hard to do the right thing, make so many sacrifices for my loved ones, and they don't even bother to try. And it's all so confused and frustrated and I don't know what to think.

I want to tell you about my health, and how things are happening to my body that are scaring the pants off me, and so many of the symptoms that I'm getting are leading to one specific condition - but I don't want to talk about that condition until I'm a little more sure, can't even go and say to my doctor that I think I may have it, because it's a zebra diagnosis and I already have a reputation as being a hypochondriac, and if I say something and it turns out I DON'T have it then none of my doctors will ever take me seriously again. So there's nothing I can do but wait and watch and observe to see if things get worse.

I want to tell you about LOML, and his problems - but I can't do that, because I promised myself that I'd stop writing personal stuff about him in here. And may have to delete what I've written. Even though I've never mentioned his name. Because I know he would hate me talking about it, even while his life and problems affect me enough that I consider it part of my own life stuff.

I want to tell you about how the three men who mean the most to me outside my family have all dropped me like a hot brick this summer, two of them with little to no explanation, and how I feel horribly alone, even when I'm in a room full of people who love me. And how I don't know how to deal with loneliness, because it's not something that's ever really affected me before. Until now I've always thrived on being alone, and had enough inner activity to never feel lonely or bored. And now I don't know how to deal.

I want to tell you about how much I miss Kurisu-San, but God knows I've told you that enough.

I want to tell you about the utter shittiness that is hypoglycemic dysphoric disorder / neuroglycopenia, that has affected me since I was seventeen but has, for some reason, gone out of control this summer, so that when I get low blood sugar my mood takes a downswing that can be anything from mild irritability to black despair to extreme paranoia to suicidal thoughts to crazy rage, that makes me so upset and irrational that I don't realise I'm being irrational, that makes me wonder if I've suddenly had a psychotic break - until I eat something. And then I feel fine. Even though I was diagnosed by a specialist back in Sixth Form, I still feel like I'm going mad when it happens. How can a basically happy, well-adjusted (OK, stressed-out, but that's temporary) person suddenly become irate, paranoid, even suicidal, just because she skipped a meal? I don't know, but it happens. Craziness.

I want to tell you the fun things, too - the wonderfulness that is Ms Babs who I met two weekends ago, and how much I love Autumn, and how Michael at the bank finally sorted out my finances so that I shouldn't be totally screwed for the rest of the year, and might even have some money for college clothes.

But...yeah. I have all those posts in my head, but getting the words down, so that they sound right, is just beyond me right now.

So here. Have a taste of the best thing that happened to me this week.





No, I didn't make it - it's from Dixie's Cupcakery in town. They actually bake a full-sized Oreo into the bottom of the cake itself. Bliss. I should have only eaten half a one, though - I think my teeth are about to fall out. The ones I have left, anyway.

(Written two or three days ago, and somehow I forgot to post. Oops.)